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Pop Goes Religion - Terry Mattingly

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EDITOR'S NOTE

Terry Mattingly is a journalist's journalist. If you want to find out what he believes by reading his columns, good luck. He's always balanced and fair, and he leaves out his opinion in favor of the person he's interviewing. I first met Terry a decade ago when I was being interviewed for one of his columns and noticed this quality about him right away Terry believes that God and religion are important, but he also sees the value of pop culture and the need for people of faith to understand and be present in pop culture. Anytime religion and pop culture converge, he is there with pen and notebook ready to chronicle what he sees for the rest of us.

I really couldn't think of a more fitting book to launch the Bully Pulpit book series than Terry's Pop Goes Religion. I have been prodding Terry to write this book for at least eight years and am honored to be able to play a role in its release.

Bully pulpit was a term coined by one of my heroes, Teddy Roosevelt, who used the term bully to mean good and pulpit to mean a place from which to give one's opinions. Declaring the presidency to be a bully pulpit, Roosevelt used his high office to argue passionately for his convictions. In much the same way, this series will allow passionate writers who specialize in topics where pop culture and faith intersect to bring important ideas to our collective attention.

Special thanks to Kate Etue for editorial patience, Michael Ramirez for an outstanding logo and Rob Stennett for skilled editing.

MARK JOSEPH

General Editor,

Bully Pulpit book series

FOREWORD

As a Hollywood producer I am often asked how I am able to reconcile my love for God with a job that frequently has me working with people who often disagree with my beliefs. To me the answer is simple: God has given me an ability to produce movies and television, and I want to do it for his glory.

Sometimes my movies reflect my faith in God; other times I'm just telling a great story. In both cases, I'm doing what God created me to do.

Terry Mattingly's Pop Goes Religion is a look into the lives of people like me who have decided to take their gifts and put them to work in the center of the popular media culture. Some may be concerned that this will result in the trivialization of God, Jesus, faith and all that is sacred. Others disagree — believing that when Jesus' Great Commission is to be taken literally, the message is to be taken everywhere including cartoons, comic books, rock music, movies, books, television, the Internet and any other means of communication available to us today. Read the book and decide for yourself.

Reading Terry's book, I am intrigued by J.R.R. Tolkien and his passion for the written word, grateful that C.S. Lewis brought his faith to bear on the Narnia Chronicles, amazed at the fortitude it took for Mel Gibson to bring The Passion to the big screen, and surprised to learn that Van Halen was once fronted by a singer who was as passionate in his love for God as he was for rock music.

From VeggieTales to The Simpsons, Harry Potter to The Matrix, Terry Mattingly chronicles just how common it has become to find God in popular culture. Like a prophet of old, Terry Mattingly is telling us the story of how God has refused to cooperate with those who think he shouldn't be a part of popular entertainment.

Join me at this intersection of faith and culture, and watch how Terry gets it right, asking the questions that make this place uncertain and affirming at the same time.

RALPH WINTER

Producer,

X-Men movies,

Fantastic Four

INTRODUCTION

Jesus just left Chicago and he's bound for New Orleans.

Well now, Jesus just left Chicago and he's bound for New Orleans.

Workin' from one end to the other and all points in between.

— ZZ Top¹

Pick up any modern newspaper, and you can read what is happening in the world of entertainment. Pick up the nation's best newspapers, and you can read about the latest news in the world of religion, both in the United States and abroad.

But what happens if you try to put these two worlds together? I happen to think that some of the most interesting stories on the entertainment beat today have to do with religion. At the same time, some of the most interesting stories on what professionals often call the Godbeat have to do with what is going on in what many people still think is the Godforsaken world of entertainment.

So there you have it. That sort of explains why this book exists.

However, to really get in sync with what follows in these pages, you need to picture in your mind's eye the following bizarre scene from my life as a journalist. This will be complicated, so hang on.

It is the summer of 1986, and I am camped out near the elevators of a fine hotel in downtown Denver, waiting for the city's first glimpse of Bishop J. Francis Stafford of Memphis, Tenn., who has just been named as the new archbishop of Denver. Stafford is a complex and interesting man, a first-round draft pick of the Catholic ecclesiastical and intellectual establishment in his hometown of Baltimore. After a decade in Denver, he became a cardinal and moved to one of the top slots in the Vatican.

However, when it comes to popular culture, Stafford would be the first to confess that he has no credibility — zero, zip, nada — on the street or at the mall.

Once, while driving to work, he found himself behind a car with a bumper sticker that read: John Lennon Lives! The archbishop was curious about the meaning of this phrase, and as he later told the story, he turned into Denver's famous Tattered Cover Book Store to do some research. You see, he did not know who John Lennon was, and he also had no idea why some people needed to have faith that he was still alive, as a person or as a metaphor. I never had the courage to ask him if he had heard of the Beatles.

Stafford is not alone. I have met quite a few powerful shepherds who know little or nothing about the media forces that dominate the lives of the people in their flocks. Hold on to that idea for a few pages.

So I am waiting outside that elevator for a simple, journalistic reason. This Stafford fellow is about to become the biggest religious figure in Denver — a very competitive news town — and I want to be the journalist who gets the first interview.

The rest of the media is waiting in the lobby and outside the building. However, a source inside the archdiocese staff has told me when Stafford plans to leave the hotel, and with that information, it was easy to figure out which elevator he would almost certainly be using. So I'm thinking that, if I play my cards right, when the elevator doors open, I may be able to quietly steer this future prince of the church around the corner into a conference room and get that interview. Then I might even be able to kindly point him toward a side door out of the hotel, helping him avoid the rest of the media horde and, by the way, making my interview an exclusive. Reporters do things like that.

Lo and behold, there stood a sharply dressed man whose face and beard would be familiar to anyone who watched MTV in the 1980s or who has paid any attention whatsoever to classic music videos.He is pointing at me.

It is Billy J. Gibbons, the lead singer-guitarist for the bluesy trio called ZZ Top, which has since been enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. ZZ Top is in town playing a show, so Gibbons has just returned from a sound check at the nearby arena. He's wearing an ultraloud red satin ZZ Top roadie tour jacket, a ZZ Top baseball hat, and some not-so-cheap ZZ Top sunglasses. His trademark waist-length beard is, of course, combed out really fine. This man stands out in a crowd.

Now, the reason I know Gibbons is that I grew up as a Southern Baptist preacher's kid in the Texas Gulf Coast refinery town of Port Arthur.

I guess that takes some explaining, too.

You see, Southern Baptists back then didn't dance, and for all I know, that may still be true of Southern Baptist preachers' kids —unless they dance to the Christian rock bands that play in the main church services these days. (Isn't that ironic?) But back when I was in high school in the early 1970s, the deacons' kids would turn a PK over to the Baptist powers that be really quick if you so much as shimmied in a public place.

So I knew nothing at all about dancing. But I still went to the hot local music joint — that would be the Port Arthur Teen Club — to pay close attention to what was happening onstage. In other words, I actually listened to the music. Plus, some of my friends had a band that was good enough to be the warm-up act for the top bands in the region. I used to help them set up their equipment before the shows and then hang around to help the main band on the marquee.

This is how I met the guys in the hottest band on the Gulf Coast during those years — ZZ Top.

A decade later, I used that Port Arthur Teen Club connection to work my way past the security personnel for an interview with Gibbons and company when they played at Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That was while I was writing a weekly column on rock music for the local daily newspaper. One of the most interesting groups I got to interview during those years was an intense, seriously postpunk quartet of Irish guys in a panel truck. The young U2 was bouncing around the country playing small halls in support of their new album, called October, which was about all kinds of things, like God, death, heaven, hell and the terrors of adolescence. But that's another story.

Anyway, the point is that I was a music fanatic who enjoyed writing a rock column for several years before I started covering the religion-news beat full time in Charlotte, N.C., and then in Denver.

So that's why Gibbons recognized me that day at the hotel elevators in Denver. He knew I was a journalist. But I was also a journalist who, as a kid, used to lug around his guitars and amplifiers at the Port Arthur Teen Club.

Gibbons barely had time to say, What in the world are you doing out here? when, sure enough, the elevator doors opened and out walked the new archbishop. Since Gibbons and I were standing in the way, Stafford stopped and looked us over. At the same time, Gibbons checked out the archbishop's threads. Roman Catholic prelates stand out in a crowd, too.

Try hard to picture that scene. These two men are high priests in radically different churches.

After a few awkward seconds, I did the first thing that came into my mind. I introduced myself to the archbishop, asked if he had a few moments he could spare for an interview — he said yes — and then turned and did the next round of introductions.

Uh, Bishop Stafford, this is Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. Perhaps you've seen them on MTV Uh, Mr. Gibbons, this is Bishop J. Francis Stafford, the new archbishop of Denver. He's moving here from Memphis.

As it turned out, Gibbons knew Memphis quite well, but not for the same reasons as the archbishop. After all, there may be more blues guitarists in the city of Memphis than there are Roman Catholics. That may even be in the census data.

We chatted for a minute, and then Gibbons said something that perfectly summed up that moment for me. You can consider this the mission statement for this book, if you wish.

Wait a minute, said Gibbons. You went from interviewing people like me to interviewing people like him?

Yes, I did, I said. It was an interesting career move.

But, you see, I never stopped being interested in what rock stars and other entertainers had to say about issues of life and death, joy and sorrow, heaven and hell. I also became more and more interested in what all of those archbishops and other mainstream religious leaders said — or didn't say — about the world of entertainment and popular culture.

These were, you see, the two halves of my journalistic life.

Bishop Stafford, meet Billy Gibbons. Of course, I realize that you have probably never heard of each other.

Please understand that there are so many other introductions I wish I could make. Most of the people who run our newsrooms and studios struggle to understand the role that faith plays in this culture. Then again, the overwhelming majority of the leaders of mainstream religion have a love-hate relationship with mass media.

So I kept writing about music and entertainment, even after I switched over to covering the religion beat. I have always been fascinated with the tensions between these two crucial parts of American life — the world of organized religion and